This Thursday, October 13, at 7 pm the second film in my film series Jurakán, After Maria: The Two Shores, will screen at The Garfield Theater in Cincinnati.
The first film, Landfall, dealt with the multiplicity of problems that Puerto Rico is facing now: hurricanes, earthquakes, and a financial crisis followed by policies enabling disaster capitalism for investors from other places at the same time as measures of extreme financial austerity for people on the island that are making life increasingly unsustainable for many.
Unsurprisingly, given these circumstances, many people have been forced to leave the island. In February of 2018, 4 months after Hurricane Maria hit, CNN cited anthropologist Jorge Duany who called the resulting exodus "the greatest migration ever from Puerto Rico since records have been taken." In the months after the hurricane, FEMA received over a million applications for disaster relief related to the hurricane, on an island with a population of a bit over 3 million. People who left immigrated to every single U.S. state, but the largest percentage, 52%, went to Florida where Puerto Ricans had already been migrating for some time. Many already had friends and family there.
Since Maria, the population in Puerto Rico has only gotten older and poorer. Many of those who have the means and those who can find jobs have left or are leaving. This is not everyone of course. There are some from the diaspora who have returned in order to pitch in and help, and there are Puerto Ricans and others who are digging in, refusing to leave, and using anarchist strategies to create alternative networks that offer support and resistance, because no one has faith that the government will come to our rescue. People are fighting, but, increasingly, they talk about how tired they are of having to fight so much.
After Maria: The Two Shores, directed by Sonia Fritz, documents the experiences of Puerto Ricans on the island and in Orlando, Florida after the hurricane. It shows the circumstances that have forced some to leave their homes and others to stay, dividing families, and how people have adjusted to life in their new home.
Sonia Fritz is a filmmaker who has always been interested in migration. She was born and raised in Mexico City, and studied film at the Autonomous University of Mexico. She moved to Puerto Rico in 1985 and has directed fiction films and documentaries from 1983 to the present. Moving between Puerto Rico, Mexico and the United States, major themes in her work are the life-experiences of women in all three countries, and migration. Her films include Myrna Baez, The Mirrors of Silence (1989) about a Puerto Rican painter, Visa for a Dream (1990) about undocumented female Dominican workers in Puerto Rico, Luisa Capetillo, Passion for Justice about a female labor organizer and anarchist in Puerto Rico (1995), A History of the Puerto Rican Community of Lorain (2001) about Puerto Ricans in Lorain, Ohio, and Mariachis with Pants (2019), about a female Latina mariachi band in New York.
After the film, Sonia will join us in the theater via Zoom. Documentary filmmaker and film professor Sara Drabik and I will talk to her and then open the conversation up for questions from the audience.
Tickets are $10 in advance or $15 dollars at the door at The Garfield Theater, 719 Race St., Cincinnati, Ohio.
You can buy them online here.